The Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam is recruiting three full-time PhD positions for the project The social life of sexuality. Please spread the word in your network, and perhaps you know someone who may be interested in the following research:
Are you curious about how the idea of ‘sexuality’ as we know it now has taken root in the last century? Are you interested in exploring this empirically by studying how people engage in both same-sex and cross-sex practices and how this is culturally understood across generations? Do you have affinity, interest, or experience with ethnographic research on erotic practice? Are you familiar with or curious about anthropology; gender, sexuality and queer studies; and decolonial theory? And importantly, do you enjoy working in a team of spirited researchers?
The social life of sexuality is an ethnographic study of sexual practices and the continuum of same-sex and cross-sex sexual behaviour in four distinct sociocultural contexts (Ghana, Kenya, the Netherlands, Poland). In recent decades, sexuality has often been studied as identity (categories), in relation to rights, and vis-à-vis power. Departing from this well-established area of research, this project examines how sexual practices are shaped by and understood in a larger cultural (and changing) context where ‘sexuality’ has gained a particular meaning. It will particularly focus on people who do not neatly remain within the categorisations scholars or their society usually rely on, as well as the resulting paradoxes. A few studies have shown how, when people do not recognise themselves in terms of LGBT+ or heterosexuality, the existence of queer possibilities and affordances within the supposed iron law of heteronormativity goes unnoticed. This project will study what may be called the ‘unruliness’ of sexuality. This knowledge will lay the groundwork for innovative analyses in the field of gender and sexuality studies.
The research team, consists of three PhD candidates, a postdoctoral researcher (for the case of the Netherlands, and will be recruited later), and the Principal Investigator, will conduct ethnographic research to advance theories of ‘sexuality’ by provincializing Euro-American underpinnings through postcolonial and postsocialist knowledge.